Hi,
>....though COS rings a bell, so presumably that entire bootrom
>including Front Panel was called COS....
I'm not sure....it's been a while.
I do recall though that at one point we had a pair of cassette recorders
running on the machine, COS had PET like support for them.
>....even though we actually justed booted 31K (and later, 56K!)
>builds of CP/M....
Our original cassette based system I think had just 16K of RAM.
All the CP/M based machines were 32K machines....apart from one which had
been mistakenly shipped with 64K. :-)
>....Later on, we bought two 480Zs (in black, to match) and a
>Memotech MTX512.
Never seen the 480Z (except for photos).
Those Memotechs were nifty machines. I used to have a pair of 512s and a 500
with the SDX disc upgrade.
I wish I'd kept that one now, I've only ever seen the FDX mentioned in the
Memotech literature - never the SDX. It was a unit that attached the the
"cartridge" port on the left of the machine (same shape as the machine,
about 3" wide) and had a BBC like drive attached via a ribbon cable.
> At first, two maths teachers were conscripted into teaching
>'O' level Computer Studies....
Same at our school.
>....which involved talking about core memory and learning BASIC....
Luckily ours were a bit more knowledgable....that said the emphasis was
still on stuff like core memory etc since that's what was on the exam paper.
> My school only taught Computer Studies for four years, because
>teaching about computers was quickly displaced by learning about
>computers in other subjects....
I think at my old school the computer science stuff was taken over by the
science department after I left. Then later on they created a "computing"
department.
> CESIL, Computer Education in Schools Instructional Language.
>CESIL was hilarious. We had an interpreter for it, written in
>BASIC so that it ran many times more slowly than BASIC....
The one we had was a stand alone interpreter, it booted from cassette just
like BASIC did.
>....despite looking like assembler, with instructions like JIZERO....
I kind of liked it. Although it was too simple to be of any real long term
use it was interesting....
But then I'm biased, I know a bunch of high level languages, but I've always
been an assembly language programmer by choice.
> Absolutely. Our assembler only took 8080 mnemonics, so I continued
>using the Front Panel and DATA statements in BASIC.
That'll have been the standard CP/M assembler, we had ZASM too which
accepted Z80 mnemonics (thank goodness, I've never liked Intel's assembly
language syntax).
TTFN - Pete.
--
Hardware & Software Engineer. Sound Engineer.
Collector of Arcade Machines, Games Consoles & Obsolete Computers (esp DEC)
peter.pachla_at_wintermute.org.uk | www.wintermute.org.uk
--
Received on Tue Mar 21 2000 - 17:43:24 GMT